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- Growing up in France, in a predominantly white community, race was never discussed.
- As a mixed-race person, it can be difficult to exist at the intersection of different identities.
- My ethnicity can also be a strength that allows me to navigate a world between cultures and races.
My dad is from Guadeloupe, a French island in the West Indies. When he was 18 years old, he moved to the mainland and met my mom. They settled together and started their family in the Southwest of France.
I grew up in a biracial household in a white-majority country where race is considered a taboo topic. I knew I was different from most kids at my school, but I didn't have the tools to understand why.
Being biracial has led me to question my identity a lot; I'm not white, but I'm not Black either — so what does that leave me with?
I don't feel like I own this part of my identity
People I meet for the first time often ask me about my "origins" — it's not something that used to bother me. But the older I get, the more I realize I don't feel I own this part of my identity.
There is almost nothing that ties me back to Guadeloupe. I have never lived there, I don't speak the local language, and I don't know my way around. What I do have, however, is the color of my skin, the texture of my hair, and the shape of my nose.
For a good chunk of my life, I was oblivious to the meaning of any of this — almost all of my friends were white, and I never talked about race with anyone; I never even really acknowledged it in myself. For all I knew, I was a tanned white girl who occasionally traveled to the Caribbean and enjoyed eating delicious spicy food.
I look racially ambigious
I never got my identity explained to me. So, I had to find ways to make sense of it by myself. I used to subconsciously see myself as an "exotic" but mostly white girl because it was easier than dealing with the existential dread of "Wait, so who am I?".
There is a certain amount of dysmorphia involved in the way that I think about my own image. When I look in the mirror, I can't see anything other than me. But over the years, people have told me that I looked Mediterranean, Asian, Latina, and whatnot. Part of my biracial experience comes down to acknowledging that I'm going to look like somebody different in everyone's eyes.
Looking and feeling racially ambiguous has sometimes felt othering and occasionally made me feel like I didn't belong either in white majority settings or in Black majority ones.
I wish I had had a community
Growing up, I think I needed a community that could have taught me how to deal with these feelings. I needed people to show me how to practice self-love in a society where beauty is centered on whiteness and how to feel secure when there were parts of myself I didn't understand.
I now realize that being surrounded by default whiteness all my life has killed sprouts of my identity that could have flourished if I had grown up on my dad's side of the world, surrounded by more people of color.
Yet I find a lot of comfort in meeting people with experiences similar to mine, people who exist at the intersection of different identities, too — not just biracial people but anyone with a rich heritage, multiple nationalities, or native languages. I call the feeling that we share — a nostalgia for lost origins, as we constantly wonder who we could have been if we had leaned into different parts of ourselves.
It's harder to experience belonging at the crossroads of identity. I have grown to appreciate this aspect of my life because it also allows me to navigate a space inhabited by billions of people that exists between races and nations. When I meet someone who understands this, I instantly feel connected to them.